Yeah, I know, I was a little late with getting this chapter up. Sorry... please forgive me and keep reading and reviewing. Hope you enjoy this... more E/C goodness for everyone to enjoy.

Chapter 17

The week that had taken so long to come now seemed, to me, to be passing too quickly. My mother always used to tell me "time flies when you're having fun", and she had never been more right. There just wasn't enough time for me to do everything I had planned. Admittedly my 'plans' really consisted of relaxing and spending time with my family, but a week didn't feel anything like enough time for me to be away from school and all the problems and worries that lay back there.

During the day I either stayed in watching videos and reading, or I went out into the city. Mostly I went alone, although sometimes Paula and Joseph would come with me, showing me some of the interesting places that they had discovered in the past weeks. Unfortunately my father was working most of the time, but there was always the evenings to spend with him. We went out for delicious Italian cuisine, and even attended a special concert that my father had been given tickets for. In keeping with the Italian surroundings, it was a rendition of Verdi's Requiem, and I loved every second. The thundering of the Dies Irae rang in my ears all through the night as I lay in bed.

"Yes, it was a commendable performance," Erik told me when I saw him the next day.

I stared at him. "You were there?"

Instead of replying, he only smiled and pressed a light kiss to my forehead.

Ever since that first night back in Rome I had seen Erik at almost every possible time. This meant that whenever I was alone in the house for a period of time, he was sure to turn up. It was like he waited, watching every moment for the right time to emerge. And it always excited me to think of those times… whenever Paula announced she was going out for a while, I would have to conceal my secret delight. Even if Joseph was left under my watch, like today, it didn't detract from my happiness.

And, of course, even when he wasn't there, I could always sense him somewhere close. But it still surprised me how he was really able to go anywhere I went.

"You're just everywhere, aren't you," I teased him gently.

Still smiling, he curled his fingers around my hair. We were in my room – I had been sitting in my swivel chair, trying once again to get to grips with some Italian, when Erik had appeared from the cellar and crept up behind me, as was his habit. Now "Italian for Dummies" was discarded on my desk, and I was resting my head back against his stomach, enjoying the sensation of having my hair touched and my cheeks stroked so lovingly. That was another wonderful thing… ever since coming back the physical side of our relationship had progressed. Where before, we had both been so hesitant of openly displaying our affection, now it seemed to come much more naturally. It made me feel more like I was in a perfectly ordinary relationship.

"I'm wherever you are," he murmured back softly. For a second I thought we were going to descend into an uncomfortable silence, but he lightened the mood by shrugging slightly and saying: "I like to keep an eye on you."

My smile widened. I wouldn't have thought it would be so wonderful to have someone watch me so closely. A few weeks ago it had frightened me to think Erik was there all the time, watching. But now I felt more comforted by it than worried… as though he had become a kind of guardian angel, which was in some sense true.

"I could keep a better eye on you," he went on casually, "if you were to come and stay with me."

I think I almost fell out of my chair at this suggestion, which caught me completely off guard. Was Erik really proposing that I… go back down there? I hadn't been back to his underground home since that night and I wasn't sure how keen I was to revisit it. Not that I found it unpleasant… it was just that down there it seemed as though the world had vanished, leaving nothing but the two of us in Erik's world. It was easy to get lost down there, and not just physically so. I felt as if I had no control when I was there… even over myself, and that was a little daunting.

Besides, thinking about this logically, what was I supposed to tell my father and Paula? As far as they knew I didn't have any friends here in Rome. I couldn't just take off for the night, not without prompting a series of questions I didn't particularly want to answer.

I explained this to Erik, but felt him tense up instantly at my apparent refusal. Worried that I had hurt his feelings, I took his hand and turned in the swivel chair so I could look him directly in the eye.

"It's not that I don't want to, Erik. I really would."

"Then I'm sure we can think of something," Erik said with an air of finality. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this determined attitude, but I knew arguing with him would be pointless.

"What do you suggest?" I said, having no idea myself of what to say.

But before Erik had a chance to make any suggestions, a sound came from the baby monitor on the desk beside me - a reedy, wailing sound that was almost as painful as nails across a blackboard. Across the hall, Joseph was making his presence known, and he wasn't happy.

With an exaggerated sigh, I stood up with great reluctance, feeling Erik's hands fall away from me.

"Got to go tame the wild beast," I said, grinning sardonically.

I went through to Joseph's nursery and found him sitting up, staring through the bars of his crib. His usually cute little face was now red and creased from his fitful crying. Usually he was pretty quiet, a little angel compared to some of the nightmare children you hear about these days. But just occasionally something would set him off. All I could hope for was that it wasn't a major problem and he'd be calm again after a little cuddle.

"Alright, buddy… what's up with you?" I said, reaching into the crib and carefully lifting him out. I patted his back gently and shushed him, but to no effect. "Come on… don't be like that." But Joseph was determined to 'be like that' and nothing I could say and no amount of cuddling and kisses would make him stop.

A cool hand pressed against the small of my back. "What's wrong?"

I turned to Erik, who had followed after me, and gave him a helpless look. "I don't know." I sniffed. "Doesn't smell like he needs changing to me. Must be one of those moments. We'll just have to wait for him to get all cried out." Balancing the little boy on my hip, I gave his hot, tear-streaked face a wipe with a tissue, still making little hushing noises in the hope he would actually start paying attention to them.

I could feel Erik standing close to me, watching closely to everything I did. Turning my head up, I caught his gaze and felt the smile slide slowly across my face. He too was smiling, but I only had a moment to register this before he had bent down to kiss me. It wasn't a passionate kiss this time… it was a soft, lingering touch of his mouth against mine. Joseph's complaining wasn't exactly a romantic accompaniment, but I didn't care until I drew back and realised that the little baby was beginning to calm down. I looked down at him, and realised that he was now too preoccupied with his new visitor to cry. He looked up at Erik with a wide eyed curiosity that I found adorable, but Erik seemed to find unnerving. I guessed his experience with children must be quite limited.

"He likes you," I said with quiet amusement.

Erik looked taken aback by this observation, and stared at me, and then Joseph. It was strange to see him so unsettled after getting used to him being the calm one all the time. But I guessed even Erik had things that worried him.

I, on the other hand, found things like this delightful. What did unnerve me was when my eye caught an unexpected movement and I looked off to one side and saw that there was a mirror set against one wall. It wasn't a very big mirror, but it was certainly big enough to show the reflections of me, Joseph and Erik, standing closely together. If we hadn't been moving, I could almost have sworn it was a portrait… like a family portrait.

At some point Erik must have noticed my wayward gaze and followed it, because now his masked eyes met mine in the mirror. We watched ourselves with a mixture of wonder and some other emotions… with excitement, at least on my part, as if this were some kind of sign.

But for Erik, the sign was something else. As I watched his eyes hardened, and at first I thought he was angry with me, before I realised he was staring at his own reflection… and staring at it with such loathing I had to force myself not to step back. It was as though he saw a mortal enemy in front of him.

Before I could say a word he stepped away from me. Initially I thought he was going to leave the room, but instead he took a few steps until he was almost touching his own reflection. And there he continued to glare with intense hatred. I could see his shoulders shaking with it, and instinctively held Joseph tighter against me, fearing some angry outburst.

It was a good thing I followed my instincts, because little more than a second later something inside Erik must have snapped. In a blur of motion and with a deafening crash, Erik punched the mirror with his fist, swift and powerfully charged with his emotion. Jumping in shock and sudden fear, I was ready to run out of the room with little Joseph, who seemed too shocked and scared to begin his crying again at this unexpected chaos. But before I could do any such thing, Erik had swept past me and out of the room. I stepped back at the look in his eyes, which, even though it was not directed at me, sent a sickening chill through my guts. I heard him thumping angrily down the stairs and then the slam of the basement door.

The silence was punctuated by Joseph, who didn't actually burst into tears again but made a distressed noise and squirmed in worry. Thankfully, it didn't take much to hush him down this time, and once he was settled, playing with one of his many stuffed animals, I left the room to follow Erik. The wisdom of doing this was more than questionable, given the temper he was in now, but I had to go after him, even if it was only as far as the basement.

Pulling the door open, I peered down into the gloom, trying to make out a shape.

"Erik?"

There was no reply, and I thought he might have retreated back into his home, until I turned the light on and found, to my surprise, that he was merely standing by the entrance to the tunnel, as if undecided about whether he should leave. Well… at least I could try and find out what was wrong, or perhaps repair some of the damage. I didn't pretend to be completely ignorant of why exactly he had broken the mirror. I'd always suspected that he, in some way, hated himself. Perhaps that was the reason for the mask… his enforced solitude… and his terribly thin build. After all, anorexics often thought they were ugly unless they were thin. Could Erik have a similar problem?

If so, then how could I convince him that I didn't find him ugly? That I liked him just the way he was… maybe even…

"Erik?" I said again to his turned back. "Are you okay?" Inwardly I cursed myself for asking such a bloody stupid question. Of course he wasn't alright… the broken mirror upstairs was evidence enough of that.

Cautiously, I took the few steps that lay between us, and rested my hand on his arm. The muscles stiffened under my fingers, but I refused to be daunted.

"Erik… talk to me," I urged gently, reaching out with my other hand.

"Don't."

I winced, not merely at the rejection but at the dead, emotionless quality of his voice. It sounded so doom-laden I wanted to cry. But instead I gripped his arm tighter and tried again.

"Please, Erik - "

"I said DON'T!"

With this more forceful warning he pulled his arm out of my grip and began to stride off without looking back. But this time I wasn't going to let him walk away from me, and I reached out to grab his hand back. It stopped him in his tracks, and he turned, no doubt to shout at me once again, but my own cry overshadowed his, because I could feel something warm and wet sticking to my fingers and palms.

"You're bleeding," I cried.

Angrily, he tried to pull his hand away again. "It's nothing."

Ignoring his dismissal, I pulled the injured limb towards me and tried to examine it under the dim light. Erik didn't attempt to withdraw again, but grudgingly allowed me to look. I could feel the tension rising off him in thick waves but all I could think about was that his hand, which played the piano with a perfection and skill that no one else on earth possessed, was injured. I could think of nothing worse than that he might never be able to play again.

"I can't see it in this light… come back upstairs."

Once more I wouldn't take his refusals, but he seemed only half-hearted now in his attempts to get away from me. There was a note in his voice that tried to be angry but, to me, only sounded pained. Leading him upstairs to the kitchen, cupping a hand under his to catch the droplets of blood flowing from the cuts, I turned the water on and ran it until it was warm. Then, tenderly, I began to wash the blood away. I bit my lip on seeing the little cuts all over the backs of his fingers and knuckles, and hoped there were no shards of glass embedded in the skin.

"Does that hurt?" I asked.

He didn't reply aloud, only shook his head and I realised he was watching me with infinite care. But not my hands or the way I was trying to wash his cuts… he was watching my face, and I realised that I had unshed tears in my eyes. Trying to be strong, I blinked furiously to keep them back.

"I'll… I'll go and get some antiseptic."

Now it was Erik's turn to stop me in my tracks. He refused to let go of my hands, gripping them tightly even as blood began to rise from the cuts once again.

"Don't worry, Christine. I'll take care of it later…"

"But I want to help," I protested, feeling a lump rising in my throat. For whatever reason, I felt as though Erik's injuries were somehow my doing.

But he smiled down at me and reached up with his one good hand to stroke my hair back behind my ear. "Then stay," he said simply, before bending down to kiss me. At first I wanted to stop him, still feeling the urge to take care of him, but he wouldn't have it, and held me tightly with one hand on the back of my neck. Finally I succumbed and slipped my arms up and around his body, pressing the palms of my hands between his shoulder blades. The passion in our kiss grew quickly until I found myself pressed back up against the kitchen sink, hardly able to catch my breath as Erik pressed his mouth fiercely against mine. But my fervour matched his this time and I nearly forced him to crush me in his embrace. I just couldn't have him close enough to me.

Eventually the wildness faded, to be replaced by something entirely different… a deep, sensual kiss that stirred up the fire burning deep inside my body. There was so much longing… so much neediness I felt weak with it… as though my legs were going to give way beneath me.

We drew apart, but only barely. Erik's masked face was barely inches from mine, and his grey-blue eyes, glazed with his passion, seemed to fill my entire future. Our hearts were beating erratically against each other, and we were fighting to control our breathing. But it was Erik who found his voice first… as he pressed the cold forehead of the mask down against mine, watching my eyes intently from that minute distance.

"I love you."

His voice was less than a whisper, and it took me a moment to realise that those words had not been in my imagination. And when I did realise, it was as though the whole world had come to a standstill. Even time itself had stopped to witness this moment… this earth-shattering, life-altering moment when I heard him say for the first time that he loved me. My whole body quivered as my mind took this in… but my eyes were free of tears and it was like a sudden moment of clarity… as though my entire life, up until this moment, had been lived with a veil over my eyes.

And I knew what I had to say.

"I love you too."

The words came so easily that for a fraction of a second I wondered if I truly meant it. How easy could it be to say those words and not mean them? But, staring up into Erik's eyes, seeing the passion… the adoration and the love… I just knew I returned it with every fibre of my mind, body and soul.

I loved him… I really loved him.

We barely had time to enjoy the revelation, Erik's head jerked up sharply at the sound of a car pulling up outside the house, and my chest tightened, as it always did, with the fear of being caught. Quickly, Erik retreated from the kitchen and went down into the cellar, I went as far as the stone steps with him, and just before he disappeared down that secret tunnel I called out to him.

"Erik!"

He turned to look back at me, waiting for what I had to say.

"I want to come and stay with you," I blurted out in a whispered rush. "I'll think of something, I promise."

There was a brief moment when he simply stared at me, but I knew he wouldn't tell me I couldn't stay with him. I knew he would smile and nod reassuringly. I knew he loved me. And he did. The door to the tunnel closed just as the key turned in front door and Paula let herself in.

"Christine!"

Hoping the evidence of my moment of passion with Erik was not plain on my face, I stuck my head around the door of the basement.

"I'm here."

Paula hung up her jacket and gave me a curious look. "What are you doing down there?"

I was ready with an excuse, which neatly encompassed another explanation. "Looking for a dustpan," I said. "The mirror in Joseph's room's broken."

"Broken? How'd that happen?"

I shrugged, feigning ignorance. "No idea. I just heard the crash and Joseph crying. It looked like it just fell off the hook and smashed on the floor."

"Oh… well, the dustpan's in the kitchen. I'll bring it up."

I thanked her profusely, then slipped quickly up the stairs into Joseph's room. The broken mirror had not been knocked off the wall when Erik punched it, but I took it down now and, as Paula went past me with the dustpan, I escaped with it to the dustbin outside, knowing that my step-mother would be able to tell someone had punched it if she saw how the glass was cracked. I dumped it in the bin with a smile and a sigh of relief. That problem at least was solved.

What was harder to conceal, however, was what Paula termed my 'radiance'. More than once during the rest of the day she remarked how I appeared to be glowing, as if something wonderful had happened. But, as much as I ached to tell someone what had happened… that I was in love and had someone who loved me… I knew I couldn't, and I passed it off as being happy to be home.

But I had another problem to solve. I had promised Erik I would stay with him, and I was determined to keep that promise not simply because it meant so much to Erik but because I genuinely wanted to go and stay with him, even just for one night. Today was Wednesday and I would be going back to school on Tuesday, my school having this odd things about re-starting in the middle of a week. That gave me five days when I could do it… but first I would need to find an excuse to leave the house. I couldn't just up and leave without an explanation.

I was stumped… I had no idea what to say, since as far as Paula and dad knew, I had no friends in Rome. I couldn't just invent some friends to go and stay with.

Fortunately, for me, my luck had not quite run out yet.

"Where?"

"Just outside the city. It would only be for the weekend. We'd be back on Monday morning."

I listened with mild astonishment to the news my father had brought home the same day Erik and I had finally admitted our feelings for one another. Drunk on the euphoria of being loved and being in love, I was now reeling with a sense of good luck. My father, apparently, had been invited to the house of a wealthy patron of the orchestra he performed with. It seemed a very last minute arrangement, but they were hardly in any position to deny their patrons anything. They would stay the weekend, perform for the man and his friends, and then come back. Simple as that.

"You and Paula?" I asked, double-checking everything in case I was dreaming.

"That's right."

"What about Joseph?"

"Well, we didn't really expect you to take care of him for the entire weekend by yourself," my father said, to my quiet relief. I could handle my little half-brother for an evening, maybe overnight, but I wasn't ready for a long weekend with him, with no help. Besides… I could hardly have taken him down to Erik's home with me, could I?

"So he's going with you?"

"No. Paula's arranged for him to stay with a friend of hers."

Bloody hell… someone up there was definitely smiling on me these days, I thought to myself. Now it seemed I would have an entire weekend to spend with Erik. Three nights, to be precise, given that dad and Paula would be leaving on the Friday evening.

"Sorry it means we don't get to spend the weekend together, sweetheart," my father added a little guiltily.

That pulled my initial delight to a quick stop. Suddenly I realised how strange it was, for me not to have instantly thought along those lines… that this would mean less time to spend with my family. But my mind was too preoccupied with Erik to think about that, and all of a sudden I felt disturbed to think that my relationship with him was now blotting out any other relationship I had, even with my family.

But that was ridiculous, I told myself reasonably. I was just preoccupied, that's all. Anyone would be after something like this happening to them.

So I waited impatiently for the Friday evening to come, all the while having to hide my excitement at the thought of spending a few days alone with Erik. It was strange to think that I had been so hesitant about staying with Richard, yet was jumping at the chance to stay with Erik… but I waved these thoughts aside with ease now. I hadn't been in love with Richard. That explained everything.

Joseph was taken to Paula's friend on the Friday afternoon, and I kissed him goodbye. I wondered if somewhere, in his little infant mind, he remembered his masked visitor. At least I could count on him to keep my secret and, even though he wouldn't understand, I gave him a conspiratorial wink as he stared out of the car window at me. I waved to my father and Paula as they turned the car around the corner and disappeared from sight. It hadn't been a long goodbye, not compared to some we had been through, but I was moved to see just how reluctant my father was to leave me behind. But I reassured him that I would be fine by myself… and that I wouldn't throw any wild parties or blow up the house while he was gone.

Obviously I left out the crucial detail that this was because I wouldn't even be in the house.

Once the car was safely out of sight I turned and charged back into the house, making sure to lock the front door securely behind me. Quickly I headed up the stairs to my room, where I pulled a small overnight bag from under the bed and began to pack a few essentials into it. The surrealism of what I was doing tried to make itself known, but I pushed it aside in my excitement.

As soon as I had everything I felt I would need, I checked my watch. It had been a little under 15 minutes since I had been left alone and I was due to wait another three quarters of an hour, under Erik's instructions. He had told me, in all seriousness, that it would be best to make sure my parents didn't return to collect something and become worried about my not being there. It had seemed unnecessary to me then, and it was irritating to me now, since I was being forced to wait longer now for Erik to come and collect me. In this regard, patience was certainly not my strong point.

Finally, just after the 45 minutes were up, I heard my name being called softly from below. Smiling ecstatically, I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and went back downstairs to the cellar door. Briefly I set my things down and had a final check of the house. The back door… front door… windows… all locked securely. There was also a note left on the hall table, just in case my parents decided to send someone to check on me, saying I had gone out. These deceptive tactics made me uncomfortable… but eventually Erik had convinced me that this would be better than causing my parents unnecessary worry.

My name was called again, and I rushed off, grabbing my bag from the floor and taking the basement steps two at a time. The main light was off, but a little yellow light came from the tunnel, and I could make out Erik's shadow holding it up so I could find my way to him. When I was close enough, I realised he was shaking slightly. Was he as excited as I was?

"Are you ready, my dear?"

I nodded to him in the darkness.

I was ready.